MICF losing money and having scheduling woes.

[Alisso]

Originally Posted by Mythor

It'd be a brave move to stick to the schedule methinks.

I'd prefer it if they delayed it a week, but they seem convinced that the delay this year is the reason they didn't do as well.

I'll admit the weather didn't help, it certainly rained more at this year's festival than I remember it raining in previous years, but I don't know that the delay was the problem so much as just that the Comm Games had been on. Even if they'd been earlier, the festival would have suffered the impact.

Personally, I'm not sure that the swimming would have the same level of impact (no arts festival, shorter run time overall, less international attention), but it certainly would have some effect, and the question is, what are they more scared of? The effect of the swimming clashing, or the effect, as theoretically demonstrated this year, of a delay?

Then again, 2006 was a two week delay, and 2007 they're only looking at postponing it one week, so that might work as a compromise?

[veronica tghf]

Originally Posted by awaywithfairies

I'm in Sydney, too, and saw absolutely nothing about MICF here.

Well I can completely agree with that.

Meanwhile I decided at quite late notice (i.e. after the guide had come out in The Age) that I was going to actually make the trip down, and the difficulties I had trying to get some friends from Melbourne to grab me a copy of the comfest guide before they flew up to Sydney the week before I was going (as in, the week Comfest began) kind of demonstrate a failure to publicise the festival.

I would think that it would be a sensible thing to flood public places with the guides in order to publicise the event. Surely you would expect to find copies of the guide at the airport at least?

Why they didn't appear to be trying to encourage more people from interstate to come I don't know. Surely if people are coming from interstate that means that they'll probably have more time to spend going to multiple shows in a night? I mean, I cram so many shows in when I'm down there, but the friends I saw while I was down there - I only managed to convince one of them to come along to see Tripod and they're huge fans of Hot August Nights.

I agree about the Festival Club thing though. It really did suck. Sitting in the Peter Cook was cheaper and more entertaining (aside from Superband - but even that wrapped up rather early) - so I tended to just give up and headed back to the apartment to sleep.

But all the same, nothing in Sydney can compare with Comfest. Comfest is a very unique situation, and is quite different from the way I go to comedy in Sydney.

[brunswickfi]

Hope they didn't spend much money for the advertising on the met tickets - have had 2 spat out at on the tram this week - not optimum timing

[JD3000]

It seems that the doom and gloom was uncalled for.
$7.6 million in tickets sold, up on last year's $5.8 million.

Full story here: http://www.theage.com.au/news/busine...198246999.html

[Mythor]

... and the amount of money outgoing was listed where?

You have to remember that that figure is for ticket sales. Not the amount fed back into the MICF coffers. Venues, advertising, performer fees, flights (?), accomodation (?), etc all needs to come out of that first. Without knowing how much was spent on those things that article is almost entirely pointless. It's good to know there was a record turn-out this year.

Oh, wait, there was also a record number of shows being put on, wasn't there? Where's that little tidbit in the article?

AAP needs to lift their game if that's the best they can do.

[Alisso]

Not only is that ticket sales, not profit, it's TOTAL ticket sales. A lot of those figures actually have very little to do with the festival organisers, they're just sent in by the independant performers. Who get to keep any profit margin on their sales. If there is one *g*

Of course, the high ticket sales probably have a lot to do with the record number of shows, and the extremely long period in which you could buy tickets before the shows were actually on. When sales start at the BEGINNING of December in the year before the festival, and the festival doesn't start till April, you've got a lot of time to sell tickets. Which is part of the reason there were so many sell-out performances this year.

Which was good, from the immediate point of view of the performers and the festival, but I saw and heard a lot of disappointed punters who showed up on the night trying to get tickets and missed out on what they wanted to see. Some of them did go to see less well known acts, and that is a good thing, but even so, there were those who just gave up and left. Early sales are all well and good, but they need to be accompanied by early advertising.

And effective advertising, not whatever they spent the money on this year. Which no one seems to have seen, but which cost them enough money that they got all worried.

Does anyone, at all, actually know where the advertising budget WENT? No one's mentioned seeing many/any ads anywhere. I know The Age had the festival launch poster, and then the guide later on, and ads, and I know there was some street press and the banners, and the website and the mailing list, but if you weren't on the mailing list, and you didn't visit the corporate site, was there ANY indication in December that tickets had gone on sale? Apart from on here? *G*

[Mythor]

I actually asked way back in post #12 of this thread/merged-thread whether anyone had seen much in the way of advertising and there was not really a flood of people saying yes. But we're not an overly reliable source for that kind of thing. And it's probably a bit late to ask now, since it was many months ago.

They also would've done better to delay the Great Debate another couple of months and run promos for next year's MICF during it.

[Mythor]

Okay, I'm doing some of the tags for various forums and I just came across this thread again and now seems a good time to ask:

Has anyone started seeing advertising for this year's festival yet?
Has anyone seen anything about whether or not last year's Festival was eventually deemed profitable?

The dates are indeed the 4th-29th of April, as Alisso guessed earlier in this thread. And I know some of the acts that are supposedly going to be on, thanks to MOSH, as usual. But has anyone seen much more than that yet or heard any rumblings about new promotional plans for this year?

[Cherryish]

Danny Bhoy and Tim Minchin already have tickets on sale, other than that I haven't heard too much about it.
And nothing about the profits from last year -- I'd be interested to know the outcome on that, if anyone else knows?

[Alisso]

I've gotten the Fresh mailing list updates, as usual, and I realised they'd updated the website when I went to check the dates again, but if it was for that, I wouldn't have known anything was going on.

But then, I'm in Sydney. Has anyone seen much in Melbourne or elsewhere?

I'd be interested to know how many people are on the mailing list, because that's the only place apart from ticketmaster that I've seen mentions of the gala (and you have to search for it on ticketmaster), but it seems the gala is already sold out. There may be later allocations, but all the initial tickets are gone.

This PDF file about the marketing for the festival has some interesting facts and figures about last year. In particular, the Marketing Campaign pages.

And it has various MOSHers visible in the blurry photos *G*

[susanjacobs]

I'm in Melbourne. I have only seen the Fresh mail outs. I will be heading into the city this week, so I will see if there is any street ads out. I haven't really seen anything on TV or in the Thursday edition of the The Age -- only real paper I get. I read the rest online.

[Mythor]

The Age seems to be a "Media Partner" again, so they should have some stuff start appearing at some point. Hopefully.

Originally Posted by Alisso

This PDF file about the marketing for the festival has some interesting facts and figures about last year. In particular, the Marketing Campaign pages.

I find it interesting that all their actual costs are not revealed. The Media Coverage figures are all what some research firm believes the value of the coverage received was.
So, for instance, if a post on MOSH about the festival was valued at $5, then that would add $5 to their "Media Value" amount. Even though it didn't cost them a thing.

I think the only figure they mention is the vague "over $200,000" they spent on advertising materials in The Age, Leader Newspapers, InPress and Beat.
They're certainly not obliged to provide any of those figures, of course, but it does make you wonder how much of the $7.6mill in ticket sales was money already spoken for?

[Edit]
Oh and one good thing from that marketing report - it sounds like the Raw Comedy podcast was moderately successful, so there's a good chance it'll be happening again this year.

[Alisso]

Originally Posted by Mythor

I find it interesting that all their actual costs are not revealed. The Media Coverage figures are all what some research firm believes the value of the coverage received was.
So, for instance, if a post on MOSH about the festival was valued at $5, then that would add $5 to their "Media Value" amount. Even though it didn't cost them a thing.

I would assume that much of the stuff they classify as "media coverage" would be reviews and articles that they didn't actually have to pay for. They're attempting to put a monetary value on that sort of publicity, which is understandable, but just a tiny bit difficult.

Originally Posted by Mythor

I think the only figure they mention is the vague "over $200,000" they spent on advertising materials in The Age, Leader Newspapers, InPress and Beat.
They're certainly not obliged to provide any of those figures, of course, but it does make you wonder how much of the $7.6mill in ticket sales was money already spoken for?

I'd like to know how much of that ticket sales figure actually corresponds to money THEY made, not money that the individual performers got. It's good for the festival as a whole that they took in a lot of money on ticket sales, it makes it clear that there's an audience for the shows on offer. But it doesn't tell us anything about the financial state of the actual festival organisers. And it wouldn't matter if every show in the festival was selling out and making huge profits, if the festival itself goes broke, that's it.

[Mythor]

Well actually it doesn't say that the media coverage figure doesn't include coverage they paid for. It could very well include things that they paid for or produced - like the Gala on TV, for example.
I'm not sure how they would have gotten to $5mill in TV coverage otherwise?

[susanjacobs]

Originally Posted by Alisso

This PDF file about the marketing for the festival has some interesting facts and figures about last year. In particular, the Marketing Campaign pages.

One thing that I found interesting was the average expenditures of visitors. For Melbourne people, the average was $164.45. For interstate people, the average was $2,168.17 (reference pages 6-7 of the above PDF file). Those figures include things like parking, drinks, transport, tickets, etc.

For me, that is about what I paid for my see-as-much-as-I-can-in-one-night trip in to see the Festival. I think the interstate gives you a nice starting place to save up if you want to come to the festival.